Discourse on Method. Descartes

Descartes stressed that we must talk and write in a clear and distinct way. We have seen this in my blog last week. However, for him it was not only a manner how to say things but it was essential for his whole scientific approach. According to Descartes science in his time was an unsystematic gathering of facts. Moreover he was not satisfied with the syllogistic logic that had been developed by Aristotle and the logic of the scholastics, which were the accepted methods of learned thinking in those days. As such these were valuable methods, so Descartes, but they were only useful for arranging knowledge but not for acquiring new knowledge. New facts were fitted into the existing dogmatically accepted systems with the help of these systems of logic, but if this wasn’t possible, so the worse for the facts. Galileo’s problems with the roman-catholic church are a case in point. Descartes saw that the old ways led to stagnation in the development of science and that the old ways of thinking had become obsolete. Methodical thinking should have to replace the old dogmatism. For him “method” became the essence of investigating and discovering new knowledge. This made him the founder of modern science.

Trying to systematize the acquirement of knowledge, Descartes first asked what we know anyway, as an unquestionable starting point for knowledge, a so-called Archimedean point (named after the Greek scientist Archimedes, who was looking for a solid point in space in order to move the earth with a lever). This led him to his famous idea “I think so I exist”: The fact that I think shows that it is unquestionable that I exist. For Descartes this was the “first principle of philosophy”. But why is it so sure that I know this? According to Descartes this can be only so, because I see it in a clear way. By reasoning this way he got his main rule of thinking: “The things that we receive in a very clear and distinct way are all true”.

Descartes made this rule the foundation of his method. Essentially this method says that in order to get knowledge, we must either reduce existing or newly acquired insights or sense impressions to clear and distinct views or deduce them in a clear and distinct manner from other clear and distinct views. Although observations are important for getting new insights, they are not central. Most important are reason and doubt as means to determine whether the acquired knowledge is really so certain as assumed.

For Descartes “clear” and “distinct” are not vague concepts. He gives them a well defined meaning. He tells us also how to get clear and distinct knowledge and how to order our data. His method consists of two phases: First comes analysis and then synthesis. Here I cannot specify them in detail, but by analysis a phenomenon is unravelled into its most elementary parts, until one knows each element in detail and knows what makes it different from the other elements and what the relations with the other elements are. If possible one must try to grasp not more elements in one thinking than one can handle. In the phase of synthesis a theory is built up. It’s just the opposite of analysis. All the elements are fitted together into a deductive system in such a manner that one gets insight into the way the elements cohere. In a sense, the situation that existed before the analysis begun is restored but there is an important difference: Before the analysis took place the coherence of the elements was confused, after the synthesis it has become visible how the elements cohere. In short (my words) confusion has been transformed into knowledge.

Descartes’s systematization of knowledge acquirement led to a methodological turn in science. No longer the fixed and usually traditional ideas became the measure of new knowledge, but the question whether we got our knowledge in the right way. Knowledge was no longer true because it fitted our till then justified ideas but because we could justify the way we got it. Doubt became central to science but not the sceptic doubt that says that in the end there is no truth, but the methodological doubt that asks whether the method used is right; the doubt that says “better is not good enough”. This kind of doubt doesn’t bring the idea of truth into discredit but it brings truth nearer, step by step just by questioning it.

Sources

Descartes’s ideas on method can be found in his Discourse on Method and his Principles of Philosophy.